Aunt Elvis
Listening to Elvis cures my aunt’s ailments,
and she knows barely any English.
I never guess what’s been her suffering,
but she looks complacent
staring at large at nothing
that metastasizes across the corral of Jack Frost.
We listen to Presley. My hands hold
the universe of the weak tea;
she brews silence and smile;
two kittens she almost adopted play with the sun.
Wind blows brown.
Our lungs turn into clay models from a school abandoned.
The Most Rained
The most rained morning,
muted crackling, vapor rising
from the leftover riot of silence,
my siren hand pierces
your stupor of dream.
“South of being burns”, I say,
and you ask, “Where
will we find a leeway
for our offsprings?”
I know not. Rain tiptoes,
fails and falls midst
two icebergs melting apart –
the time we perceive and
the time that holds us within.
Australia 2019-2020
When winter went into emberwherein you lived your sleep?
I had a flaming kangaroo hopped between
my eyes, and I had none
until my aunt called me to tell the news.
The cold sat on our porch.
The beer bottles left for recycling spaces
refilled themselves with undyed.
Aunt turned up the news. The wildfire
crackled in the newsreader’s throat –
world just dipped south. Kaput.
I opened my sight to the life leaving lives.
Where were you? Did you see
winter fluffing the orange and red?
Our porch spread across the other dimension.
White covered our trash in another world
where I had two eyes sewn beneath,
and winter, alive, weaved a quilt of fables
for those miracles that could have been.
The One Arrested And Later Left At Our Doorstep
The missing one is restored to her apparition,disoriented, oozy-blood,
smelling like a marsh; two days’ve passed
since the protest fired up from the gully to the alcázar.
We ask the silence to nurse her.
Tim answers the media in waiting.
We blame the throne obviously.
The air stinks of conspiracy.
The missing one, reinstated, exists in flickers,
now here, now beside the basin, a hologram,
a substance, now a totem archaic,
now a numen, Jesus.
The protest flows with the paradigms.
Tim and I ask her what happened inside;
she seems to miss herself if only by a smudge of soul
or some slogan half finished.
Silence bandages her; strings her together.
Media disappears to attend another somewhere.
Kushal Poddar @Kushalpoe is a writer and visual artist and is the author of ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood’, ‘Scratches Within’, ‘Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and now ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’ (Alien Buddha Press). Author Page – amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Art works including the banner are by Kushal Poddar
IceFloe Press 